Frankie Fraser, a British underworld enforcer known as “Mad Frankie,” whose life of crime and torture led to a lucrative retirement chronicling his own grisly deeds in books, films and lectures, on stage and television, and as a “gangland” tour guide, died on Wednesday in London. He was 91.
His death was announced on his official Web site.
British news organizations said he died at King’s College Hospital in south London, where he had been admitted for a hip or leg operation and slipped into a coma on Friday last week resulting from complications during surgery.
Photo: EPA
Eddie Richardson, the head of a crime family with which he once worked, said: “He’s had a long life, and I don’t think he’s done too bad.”
Fraser is well remembered in the back streets of south London, where he sadistically worked over many a victim with an axe and pliers, and in West End theaters and broadcast studios, where he drew audiences into the raptures of villainy with accounts of his exploits from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Capitalizing on public fascination with the macabre, he made a remarkable transition from criminal and prison life to author and celebrity, becoming a household name in Britain in his 70s.
Many Americans, too, may recall his London and British bus tours, showing gawkers the prisons where he served time, the country mansions he looted, his old haunts and robbery scenes, places where gangs clashed and he was shot, and where, he said, he had maimed and killed scores of people.
It was hard to tell how much of it was true, but Fraser was an engaging performer — a small, wiry character with menacing eyes under bushy brows, a face lined with the crags of knife scars and punches, and a cockney twang that conveyed the ring of authenticity.
While officials called him Britain’s most dangerous criminal, suspected in as many as 40 killings, Fraser was tried for murder only once, in 1966. The case was dropped after a key witness experienced a memory lapse, but years later, Fraser told Seth Linder, a freelance writer, what had happened.
“It was that lovely fight at Mr Smith’s nightclub,” Fraser said. “This guy shot me in the thigh. The police alleged I took the gun from him and killed him, which, of course, I did. I wasn’t going to pat him on the back, was I?”
His exploits began in childhood with street fights, shoplifting and muggings. He became an army deserter and black marketeer during World War II, then a jewelry thief.
In the 1960s, he graduated to armed robberies, kidnapping and strong-arm duties for a vicious London gang led by Richardson and his brother, Charlie.
The gang’s members ran extortion and protection rackets, with mock trials, torture and sometimes death for those who did not pay up. The authorities said they liked to remove victims’ toes with bolt cutters. For disloyalty to the gang, they prescribed blowtorches and whippings.
Fraser’s specialty was nailing people to the floor and extracting their teeth with pliers.
Convicted of 26 crimes, he said he served 42 years behind bars and was certified insane three times, although he insisted that he had faked madness to lighten punishments with hospital stays.
Fraser was part of a London underworld riddled with a generation of cockney gangsters in bespoke suits, such as the Richardsons and the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, whose names and pictures were as likely to be found in the society pages as in the crime sheets.
He described matter-of-fact brutality on his Web site.
Under “The Chopping of Eric Mason,” a thug who threatened to accuse him falsely of starting a pub brawl, he related: “I kidnapped him and threw him in the motor, took him to our headquarters, Atlantic Machines, and chopped him up with me chopper, me axe. Then took him to the London Hospital and dumped him out there with a blanket around him.”
In Mad Frank’s Diary: A Chronicle of the Life of Britain’s Most Notorious Villain in 2000, he was more circumspect: “Sometimes when I’m signing books I’m asked how many people I’ve killed and I reply that the police say 40, and I’m not going to argue with them.”
In interviews, he remained almost nonchalant about his life of crime, saying the public had little to fear.
“Sure I was violent, “but only to people like myself,” Fraser told the Independent in 1994.
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